The invention relates to wireless communication and more particularly to the efficient transmission of data over wireless communication networks.
In wireless communication systems and networks there are several well known problems such as high error rates, long latencies, battery limitations, and scarce channel resources. To address these problems, a well developed technique known as message compression is often used. Message compression seeks to reduce the overall amount of data that is transmitted while transmitting messages. By reducing the amount of data that needs to be sent, a greater amount of channel capacity is available for error detection and, where needed, data correction. Greater channel capacity also allows a greater amount of resources to be made available for other users. Furthermore, transmitting less data takes less time and results in less power being required to decode the transmitted data.
Unfortunately, prior art message compression techniques are often inefficient. For example, message compression is often accomplished by encoding a message and transmitting a dictionary along with the message so that a receiving user equipment (UE) may decode the data. The dictionary is typically sent along with a message each time a message is sent. This increases the overall amount of data being transmitted and is particularly problematic where the amount of data included in a dictionary is similar in size or larger than the message itself.
A similar problem exists with the transmission of short single phrase (i.e. canned) messages as well as with periodically transmitted data where not all of the data changes between periods. For example, with regard to short single phrase messages, such messages may be encoded so as to reduce the amount of data necessary to transmit the message. However, the data that is required for encoding a particular group of messages to which that message belongs is often transmitted along with the message thereby increasing the overall data requirement of the message. This is particularly problematic because the data relating to compression of the message, as mentioned, is often repeatedly sent to the same UE as similar messages are often repeatedly sent to a single UE.
With regard to data that is transmitted periodically, data that does not change between periods is often transmitted along with the data that has changed. This wastes valuable system resources transmitting data that did not need to be transmitted. By way of example, where the score of a sporting event is being periodically transmitted to a user, the names of the teams/individuals will not significantly change for the duration of the event. However, in prior art systems, not only is the score transmitted periodically, so are the names of the teams/individuals participating in the event. This results in transmission of data that otherwise did not change between periods thereby unnecessarily wasting system resources.
It would therefore be desirable to more efficiently transmit data in wireless communication networks.